Susan had come south on her motorbike, racing down with the open road ahead of her, thinking about her mum on her way to Gretna Green, her future a great unknown, and about her granddad who had lied about his age so that he could go off and fight in the war. ‘He just couldn’t wait,’ said her mum. He went to Ypres, and spent the rest of his long life confined to a wheelchair.
Susan’s grandmother always believed that travelling south was easier than travelling north because south was ‘downhill’ on the map, as if anyone trying to go north without concentrating risked rolling all the way back down; as if, in fact, gravity could make anyone tumble down at any moment.
Susan remembered her first sight of Seatown. It had been getting late as she approached; the sun was going down. It looked like someone had set fire to something; it was like a house on fire on the horizon, except bigger than that: it was as if someone was burning everything they owned. She had headed towards it.
She came from a small village surrounded by countryside. She had seen the newborn lambs in the field in the spring before she left; she had got away before that moment in the summer when the lambs were taken away in the lorry. She hated the thought of them going into the lorry with no idea what was coming and no way to avoid their fate anyway. She hated seeing the lorry that pulled up outside the chicken shed with ‘EAT BRITISH CHICKEN’ printed on the back. Susan wondered if she would make it home for Christmas. On Boxing Day, the hunt rode out, despite the fox-hunting ban. Her dad used to go with them, before he fell from his galloping horse and lost the use of his legs.
Susan took out her mobile phone and looked at the screen. The signal here came and went. There was no signal right now. Sometimes she spent ages thumbing long texts to her parents, which she then could not send. Perhaps she should change her provider. She wrote another text now, even though it would only sit in her outbox with the others until a signal could be found. She kept having to stop and undo what the predictive text function inserted. Some of the sentences that predictive text wanted to construct looked like the strange non sequiturs of someone who was losing their mind. She wondered how predictive text worked. Did her phone make predictions on the basis of texts that she had previously written? Was she herself responsible for these peculiarities? Or did the odd suggestions come from a programmer? Her granddad thought that someone managed his answerphone messages, someone in a call centre, like a switchboard operator; he got cross when they tampered with his saved messages, when they deleted something without asking.
Susan signed off her text with an ‘x’ and then waited for the message to fail to send. She smoked her cigarette down to the filter and dropped it, flattening it with the toe of her sandal. She walked on, back towards the Hook, outside which she kept her motorbike. She knew she ought to get some proper motorbike leathers, and boots with toe protection and ankle, heel and shin armour. Her mum had warned her that she went too fast, that she would end up hitting the tarmac at so many miles per hour and then she’d have pins in her legs, ‘if you’re lucky’, she said.
She ought at least to get some warmer footwear for the coming winter.
Susan went back inside the pub and up to her room, where she flopped down onto her unmade bed, pulled the blanket over her and nodded off.
She dreamt that she was having difficulty walking. When she woke up, blinking in the afternoon light, she remembered the dream; she knew it was just a dream but she made a cautious effort to move her legs anyway, just in case. She did not understand what the dream meant — everything in dreams seemed to mean something else.
Sitting up, she noticed a square of paper on the carpet over by the door — a letter, she thought, or a message, that had been posted through the gap underneath the door. She walked over and picked up the scrap of paper, but when she looked at it she found that it was blank; although perhaps there was the faintest suggestion of something there, as if it had been photocopied almost to oblivion. She opened the door and peered outside but there was no one there, and no one on the stairs. She turned again to the piece of paper, and she almost thought that she might be able to make out a message after all, or just a word, but even as she looked, her sense of that dim outline disappeared, like a shadow when the sun slips behind a cloud.
2
Early in the new year, when it was still bitter outside and Bonnie was approaching thirty, she began looking for a cheap flat. She had been living in her parents’ house for years, and even though she had lived away from home before, she had never lived alone.
In her early twenties, after a gap year that had turned into three, all spent under her parents’ roof, her mother had insisted that she go away to university, if she could still find one that would take her. And so she had gone to university, although it was not, as her father had pointed out, a proper university; it was not a good university. She majored in English, because it had always been her best subject and because she had managed to get a B at A level. It was also her native language.
She had got a room in halls of residence, sharing with another girl. Bonnie’s roommate kept a diary. She wrote in it every night and stowed it under her mattress when she went to sleep. The first time Bonnie’s roommate left the diary out on the bed while she went to the bathroom, Bonnie had been unable to resist reading it; she had opened it up and seen her own name written there, and ‘weird’, or something like that — she could never remember exactly what it said, exactly what she was. She had shut the diary quickly, got into bed and pretended to be asleep when the girl came back. The diary was left out another time or two after that, but Bonnie never looked in it again.
After halls, she had lived in a shared house, where one of the other students, behind the closed door of his bedroom, used to chant every day before breakfast, ‘I am the master of my fate.’ He repeated it three times every morning without fail, before swaggering out to start his day. Another of the students used to leave photocopied leaflets lying around where they might be seen, picked up and read. The leaflets said things like: ‘God Will Save You’. Bonnie never heard him say a word, this student. If he was in the house, he stayed in his room; Bonnie only knew that he had been in the kitchen or the lounge or the bathroom because of the trail of leaflets he left behind him, like a trail of breadcrumbs laid so that no one would be lost.
In her first term, in An Introduction to English Literature, she heard about the death of the Author, and at first she wondered who they meant, and then she realised that it was all of them, all the authors, and Bonnie thought fleetingly of the dodo. And what was more, asserted Barthes, the Author enters into his own death, or her own death, thought Bonnie, who had just started writing herself. She had a vivid memory of the lecturer standing in the lecture theatre saying all this, although over time it had merged with another memory, of her mother coming into a room and saying that Bonnie’s grandmother had died. ‘She wanted to go,’ said her mother. ‘She was ready.’ There had been a funeral, of course, a week later, and at this funeral Bonnie’s mother had asked after somebody’s husband, forgetting that he had died; and then somebody else, who Bonnie’s mother was certain had died, came round with plate of sandwiches.
After a few years of literary criticism, Bonnie had found that she could no longer read a story without seeing it through a lens of critical analysis, as if there were always some underlying meaning that you might miss if you were not paying attention. And at the same time, she began to see the real world in terms of narrative; she saw stories and symbolism everywhere. She found it all exhausting, and left her course — which her father had called a Mickey Mouse degree anyway — before taking her final exams or completing her dissertation.